The mortars are widely used nowadays in coating of buildings, as well as in the respective finishing pastes. On the other hand, also the concrete with high performance at architectural level is presently a widely used material in architecture and civil Engineering, allowing answering to many technical and aesthetic challenges required by current architectonic trends.
In addition to the architectural interest, the possibility of color change of concrete and mortar depending on the temperature to which it is exposed can also be of interest from the point of view of energy efficiency. Thus, a concrete/mortar that has dark hue when exposed to low temperature during the winter will maximize heat gains to which are exposed, benefiting the building thermally. Conversely, during the summer as consequence of increasing environment temperature the color may change to lighter hues until reaching the base white color, in order to allow a maximum reflectance of solar radiation and thus minimize the heat absorption during hot weather.
This preweighed cementitious mixture with predefined thermochromatic properties can be used in the manufacture of coating and finishing mortars, in finishing and painting pastes and also in precast and in-situ concretes, thus confering the said properties to the material in its final shape.
Patent KR100890863 describes a thermochromatic concrete, i.e., a product obtained by the introduction of a thermochromatic pigment in a normal concrete, not mentioning any other applications besides concrete and presenting rather weak results of thermochromatic effect durability. On the other hand, it does not allow for a wide combination of colors and colorimetric variation ranges for different temperature stages.
Patent KR20100072530 refers to the use of thermochromatic pigments for insertion into concrete surface during its casting, by surface coating of the mold, which will hardly allow reaching a uniform surface color and also a homogeneous reaction to temperature, which is not feasible for applications in large areas according to the usual architectural requirements.